Monday, June 18, 2012

Inside the Pentagon’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller. It’s a big technical challenge — one that’s failed in the past — since the different manufacturers of different drones each have proprietary control software. But the official in charge of the effort envisions a new drone software architecture that’s agnostic about what kind of drone it controls; and allows human controllers to think in terms of drone fleets rather than individual robots, including fleets comprising different kinds of drones. That would enable a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of drone warfare.